Louis Gray and Kristen Nicole noted late last week that the all-time web statistics had completely disappeared from FeedBurner's system. Now they're back. As it turns out, it was a whole big mistake. Product Manager for the FeedBurner team at Google, Steve Olechowski stopped by Louis Gray's blog yesterday afternoon to try to clear up the misunderstanding.
Some points are being raised now whether the blogosphere rushed to judgment on this one, too, or whether it was truly a matter of reporting the facts as they were, echoing the accusations of Fred this weekend, as he talked of the coverage of Zynga and the Social Gaming Network.
Here's the thing, though, that differentiates the two stories (and within those differentiations may lay some pointers for Web 2.0 companies in the future).
* FeedBurner hadn't updated their blog since November of last year. Additionally, I can tell you as a subscriber to the FeedBurner podcast that it hasn't been updated since shortly before the purchase of FeedBurner by Google. Particularly odd habits of communication for a company responsible for an unimaginably large portion of the blogosphere's communication.
* FeedBurner didn't publicly respond to the statistics disappearance in most of the high-traffic blogs that covered and broke the story - only two, by my count.
* FeedBurner still hasn't updated their blog reflecting the biggest story about FeedBurner in the last three months.
* It was a holiday weekend, and company representatives were not readily available for comment.
Here's the point: all signs pointed towards neglect of the FeedBurner system, something that isn't uncharacteristic for Google of their acquisitions. In fact, it's starting to become a pattern. Back in April, Dodgeball, a Twitter-like acquisition by Google was pronounced dead. Jaiku is laungishing, presently suffering full catastrophic failure due to the loss of two hard disks. FeedBurner's near constant communication with their userbase has ground to a halt since their acquisition.